From Mantis 3

Interview: All Moments Are One

Michael McClure

MICHAEL MCCLURE: Douglas, you said, that for our talk today you had five key words that are embedded in the structure of your questions, and the first key word was ‘return.’ I want to tell you my response to the word “return.” When I hear the word, I think of the poem that Robert Duncan dedicated to me in 1955. It’s one of the poems in his book, Letters. Letters was the poetry that he wrote while I was taking his first poetry workshop at San Francisco State College. Robert was experimenting with composition by field, and it was his first Projective experimental book. Clearly, Robert was finding the dimensions that are possible, that were possible to utilize the page itself as the field. It was what Robert considered to be “feeled,” as you know, hence the field. I remember “Re-turn” starts, “Re / -turn. In spring-up green freshet / turn. Delight to the eye, spring / to torso, hand spring to wheel, / thigh turn upon thigh; / eye light to eye; heart / -bound as we are bound to return, / however casually, / to time or place instinct for joy: [. . .]” “Re-turn” begins that way and you can hear the performance in the poem. Duncan was a terrific reader. Another poem in Letters was “Light song” which begins, “;husbands the hand the keys a free imp- / rovisation [. . .]” This is a good place to begin a conversation that’s going to be concerned to some great extent with performance. These poems were my first sense of performance from a poet I knew personally.
DOUGLAS KERR: Let me ask one thing. The way you were taking us through the beginning of “Re-turn.” You were counting on your hand.
MCCLURE: Yeah?
KERR: That reminds me of the way that Robert Duncan read his poems much later in life.
MCCLURE: I was reading it the way Robert would, yeah.
KERR: Do you think that he was reading the poem in the fifties, without the count, or. . .
MCCLURE: He was doing it more with his voice. He began using the hands later, but when I say voice, I mean body. He’d move his body, like “Re” [pause] “turn!” and [pause] “Spring-up green” [voice rises on “up”] “freshet,” like that. And then in later years, he was fully doing it with the hands [mimics the motion].
KERR: Well, back to ‘return.’ With a poem like “Maybe Mama Lion,” which is a good place to start since it is on CD of the journal for people to hear—there are many returns. There is the return in the poem itself, a return to California with the play of “CALI, GOING BACK TO CALI” and what that might mean for you, as well as a return to a type of world-view. And then there’s also the return to actual performances. It is dedicated to Ray Manzarek.
MCCLURE: The other day, I gave a talk for the San Francisco Zen Center, and “Maybe Mama Lion” was one of the poems I spoke of. I said that our mind can, and does, flow freely and change shape. Here’s one origin of “Maybe Mama Lion:” Fifteen years ago while playing with my grandson, I jumped up onto a net in the park, and it collapsed under me, and I was knocked out when my head hit the ground. I was in blackness struggling to get back into my body again. I was billions of years away in back of my eyes in blackness, and my dead friends were there, and they were having a feast. They were clinking silver and crystal as they ate. At the same time in this blackness where I was wandering—that I was lost in—at the same time, I was walking on a ridge above the Yuba River with Gary Snyder (which did happen thirty years before), and we were looking into the river gorge and saw the top of an eagle’s wings gliding in the air below us. Days later, after my out-of-body-dream-blackout experience, I sat in the Arboretum in Golden Gate Park and wrote down, and re-experienced what happened in the blackout. My personal blackness, my end, which I was fearing, became my own voice speaking for the threatened extinction of the salmon in our rivers; and as I sat there in the Arboretum, which was my secret outdoor office in Golden Gate Park by a little pool, I decided to write the poem to perform with piano, with Ray Manzarek. This was the first piece that I wrote deliberately for piano. Ray and I were performing and on the road a lot of the time. We played our political and environmental and spiritual poems and music at colleges, and music clubs, and bars, like the Bottom Line in New York or the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco. I have come to believe that Ray and I were doing exactly what I did at the Six Gallery many years before, in 1955. We are being outspoken with, and in, the physical presence of our bodies, making statements that people perhaps already know but still want to hear, and they agree with us and feed back to us with that richness. What we are doing is very much political, very much environmental and sometimes edgy entertainment. But till “Maybe Mama Lion,” Ray and I used material that I had already written or was writing for myself. We were using my poems, and we were doing them with Ray’s music. But at that point, I wanted to write the first poem specifically for performing with Ray, and “Maybe Mama Lion” is the first one. So, there I am, and there is a return. I am coming back out of blackness, I am coming back out with the salmon [laughs], and I am back in the blackness of the memory of thirty years before with Gary on the top of the Yuba Gorge looking down on eagle’s wings. I’m there with my friends who died in the Sixties and Seventies, and they’re having a feast. I’m returning to them; they’re returning to me; I’m returning out of the blackness, which was an incalculable blackness of 40 billion years. The universe, according the Big Bang Theory, is 14 billion years old, but I’ve always known it’s at least 40 billion. (I’ve been that far back with an experimental drug.) It seemed like way, way, way back there.

For the poem, I lifted that quote from LL Cool J, “Going back to Cali, back to Cali.” Also when I perform it, I slip in my own line, “I don’t think so.” [Laughs.] In a sense I was sampling. . . Sampling LL Cool J. A year or two later, Ray and I performed with LL Cool J, on television. David Sanborne had his Night Music Hour and the night we played, the artists were Ray and I, LL Cool J, and Jean Luc Ponty, the French jazz guitarist who plays a blue plastic guitar, and of course David Sanborne played with Ray and I on that small white trumpet of his, which worked out quite well. You can hear Ray and I along with Sanborne in our documentary video The Third Mind—there’s a clip of the show. I wanted to talk to LL Cool J that night. I wanted to say, “Man, I sampled you.” [Laughs.] But, he was surrounded by an entourage; so, we had to see each other in passing. I wish we could have done, “Maybe Mama Lion,” but we were already set up do, “Love Lion Blues” on the show.
KERR: Well, for the next time.
MCCLURE: There’s some return in that.
KERR: In terms of memory and the blackout, it also seems like a moment to compare to an early poem, “The Peyote Poem.”
MCCLURE: There’s a lot of truth in that insight, Douglas.
KERR: In talking of “Haiku Edge” in Rain Mirror, a fairly recent book, you describe how Philip Whalen had talked of the ellipses, the mirroring reflection of the two parts of a haiku’s action. And then. . .
MCCLURE: Yes, action or non-action.
KERR: Or non-action. Then you also say that the haiku opens what for Buddhists may be called “realm.” I wanted to ask about your performances with Ray, if you were mirroring each other, if this opens up realms for you. Or, if that’s a misleading way to look at it, the way you two are working together.
MCCLURE: Let me give you a physiological and technical reply, I have to work up to this to make clear what I’m saying. . .
KERR: Sure.
MCCLURE: My poem “Stanzas in Turmoil,” which Ray and I usually do last in our performance set, was previously considered, in my solo readings, to be the most obscure, esoteric, arcane poem, written by a West Coast poet. The objection was that it is not about anything, not framed in any way, therefore what could it possibly be? And yet, it’s anything but that. In fact, it is my own romance with the microbiology of Lyn Margulis’ insights into symbiosis in higher cells. It was something new, radical and urgent that I believe in, and I believed that people were getting the poem anyway, getting it whether they knew what it was saying or not. They couldn’t help but get some of it. And if you get any of “Stanzas in Turmoil,” you’re getting something, not just from me, but you’re getting huge knowledges that are not merely mine.

“Stanzas,” by the way, was responsible for Ray and I working together. I hadn’t seen Ray in twenty years, since the third recording session of The Doors, and we happened to be in a poetry reading. He was playing piano for Michael C. Ford, a jazz poet, and I said, who’s that genius playing piano, oh my God, that’s Ray. Later that evening Ray heard me read my poem, “Stanzas in Turmoil,” and he said “Let’s work together. . .” and I said, “Yeah, let’s work together. . .” or maybe we both said it at the same time—shortly after that we began. And since I love “Stanzas in Turmoil,”—it is a deeply and profoundly biological poem about a major new awareness—we both wanted to do it, we do it in most performances. So, it’s also a political poem, in my understanding of political. And now when people hear it in our collaboration of words and music, they cheer for it; they stand up—they give a standing ovation. It is the final poem in our set, but it is a big part of the reason for the standing ovations. We were getting standing ovations regularly! So I asked members of the audience, “Do you understand that? That last poem?” “Oh sure,” they said. [Laughs.] “The last poem? You liked it? Did you know what it’s about?” “Oh yeah!” Everybody knew what it was about, when it was performed with Ray. I don’t think just putting the poem with music is going to make people understand it. That doesn’t make any sense.

Here is the technical part. I asked myself, “what’s going on?” And I began to figure some things out, through what little I know of brain anatomy, and through talking to friends who are much more knowledgeable than I am. My understanding of it now is that on one side of the brain there is an area that responds to pitch, and repetitions of pitch could be very close to melody, or variations of pitch could be very close to melody. On the other side of the brain is the center that responds to words. If you hear a spoken poem or you read a poem, it’s just you and your limited sensory access to this poem. You’re dealing with less than your full rich sensory potential. You’re dealing with a limited part of your nervous system and your perceptive responses. When poems are put with music so that they not only fit—but it’s almost like they love each other, or they’re like brother and sister holding hands—then what’s going on is that the two parts of the brain that lead to rich physiological levels of consciousness are interacting. And as they interact they bring about hormonal and enzymatic and muscular changes in the body. Then a person is experiencing herself or himself, by means of the poem and the music, in a fully complex and rich way. The way you understand something is by enjoying it, and the way that you enjoy something is by experiencing yourself with it, through it, by it, along with it, as part of it.

What Ray and I are doing is what other artists have done before in many other centuries and places—whether it’s the jongleur and the knight in twelfth-century Provence, or the student of Confucius sitting by a river bank with his chin, the early Chinese form of the koto, with which they accompanied poems, playing to the river and their own consciousness and counter-consciousness. Ray and I are dealing with self-perception, and the answer is self-perception. If you can respond with more parts of yourself to works of art, you have a deeper understanding. I’m not saying this is a “higher” approach to art because the specialized approaches to art are also important, but I’m speaking about what happens in our collaboration, when we’re really working. And it’s exciting for us, because then we respond with the audience [laughs].
KERR: Contact was one of the five key words for today. Contact is important for you; it’s a big word in Scratching the Beat Surface. It appears often in poets who read A. N. Whitehead, and Whitehead appears as a source in Scratching the Beat Surface. Could you play with what you were just saying about performance and biology in terms of contact? Or perhaps just move to another key word for our conversation, “poem.” I wanted to ask you where is the poem?
MCCLURE: Yeah, absolutely. Can I go back to the haiku for a minute and talk about contact? I was heading into that.
KERR: Yes, let’s go back.
MCCLURE: What Phil Whalen was saying in 1959—he said it in person, and then wrote me a letter about it—is that in one theory of the haiku, there is an image, a perception, an inspiration. And then there is an ellipsis followed by another perception or non-perception balancing the first one. There is a continuation of that original image or there is a mirror of that original image, or there is a reflection. It is similar to the way the dendrites of neurons don’t touch each other. They communicate through neurotransmitter chemicals between their tips. The two parts of the haiku touch and contact themselves by consciousness and implication, and this may make a complex and profound experience. Amongst the Japanese, often that experience is comic; oftentimes the experience is lightweight, formulaic; oftentimes it is brilliantly witty with complex references to Chinese poetry which they’re elegantly playing with for the literate class of seventeenth or eighteenth century Japan. These poems might also be simultaneously “populist” or anti-snobbish. The haiku is a great, profound Art, and I’m making a simplified picture. The Western concept is dumbed down, and we’ve made it problematical by teaching Grade School or Junior High kids how to write seventeen syllables and telling them it’s haiku. Though it can be an easy doorway to beauty and to a beginning understanding of Poetry.
KERR: Yes. That’s how most people get to the haiku.
MCCLURE: But the haiku that Zenshin Ryufu Philip Whalen is talking about is two “chunks” which have a profound relationship to one another, or they don’t. For instance, here’s a haiku that Phil wrote for me in the late Fifties. Let me gloss this: if you think of nasturtiums, they have large, round flat leaves and long, thin stems that they stand up on. Philip was fond of these, particularly the orange flowering nasturtium. No one had any money; we didn’t have a vase. We had a mayonnaise jar, and we filled it with water, and we put it on the windowsill in the sun and put nasturtium leaves in it, and the leaves were beautiful. Phil wrote this “Haiku for Mike:” “Bouquet of HUGE / nasturtium leaves / ‘HOW can I support myself?’” Almost everybody gets that. It’s so lovely, and if they understand what a nasturtium leaf looks like up on the thin, long stem—how does it support itself? It reflects Phil’s personal problem of how he is going to support himself [laughs]. At the Crossing Over Ceremony we just had for Phil’s ashes at the Green Gulch Zen Center—the Zen funeral, one of the things Gary Snyder recalled from days of yore was, “I was so glad to hear that Phil was becoming a monk and shaving his head, because I knew he would have a job and I wouldn’t have to worry about him anymore.” [Laughs.] So, I mean, that gives you the intensity of the situation, the problem which, on the other hand, has no weight at all, it’s just nasturtium leaf, floating there on nothing. It’s a masterful haiku. And that shows you that to have, “Bouquet of HUGE / nasturtium leaves [claps his hands] / ‘HOW can I support myself?’” There, after the clap, it’s a reiteration in terms of another modus. Here’s a haiku of mine, “Oh Accident / Oh perfect crushed snail / like a star gone out.” There’s Phil’s advice again: “like a star gone out,” only in this case the reiteration is a commentary from a different realm. It’s joining realms together, removing a wall.
KERR: Can you talk about the multiplication of realms interacting with each other? Because there do seem to be simple ways to see and to understand that realms are being opened. How about giving a more complex sense of it? In a performance with Ray there are the poems that people may or may not know, there’s the pitch you were talking about, your reading of the poem. What else might be there?
MCCLURE: And then you asked earlier, where is it a poem exists?
KERR: Yes.
MCCLURE: Does the poem exist on the CD? Does the poem exist in the book? Does the poem exist in the notebook? Does the poem exist in the air as sound? Does the poem exist in the ear as registration? Does the poem exist in the mind of the poet as he or she writes it? It exists in all of those places and more. It should exist as inspiration. It should exist as a charge, particularly in Projective poems. It certainly exists in the perceiver and experiencer, and it certainly exists in the creator and/or presenter. The question is how much does it exist in imagination and inspiration? Because if it does not exist in imagination and inspiration—then why bother to have it? That’s something that I’ve been working with, working with intensively for the last six or seven years.
KERR: In what way? Or, what poems could one look at?
MCCLURE: If you go to my long poem titled “Dolphin Skull,” you’ll find that “Dolphin Skull” is divided into two sections: “Stanzas in Memory” and “Portrait of the Moment.” In “Stanzas in Memory,” I wanted to go to the unconscious, where Pollock would have gone to in his psychoanalytic drawings. Wherever my unconscious is, that was where I would like to go. In writing, I was able to contact it, I was able to get there because Mallarmé pointed out that “poetry is the language of a state of crisis.” And the places that I went to were enough of a crisis that each of the seventeen stanzas of the poem is an exploration of a node in the unconscious which did not look the way I thought it was going to look. I mean it looks like that poem. That was thrilling! I’d done something Pollock had done, and it was deeply interesting to me—I was turned on by it.

It was Springtime. I was reading The Function of Reason by Alfred North Whitehead again. I saw that the poem was not finished with those seventeen stanzas. I realized what I needed to do was take one of those seventeen moments in the unconscious and explore it. So, I took the opening lines of one of the seventeen moments, and I began the next section of “Dolphin Skull” with them. This section is called “Portrait of the Moment” because in the first section I went to the unconscious, and in the next section I saw that I could explore a single moment, a moment which the unconscious had uncovered. I’m going to explore. I’m going to go with it. I began to look in every cranny and corner and nook and cuckoo clock and mossy velvet hazy bed, and into lambent and plangent and thunderous experiences—and I began exploring the moment. I explored the single moment for twenty pages, and I found out that any moment is all moments. Any moment is all moments, and that this is where poetry becomes a real tool, but a modern tool, as modern as a flint hand axe [laughs].

Then, I began to look over the poem and to think about it, and I realized every person’s moment is the same moment. It’s just that different things are happening in their moment. These are abstract things to say, but to have the experience is not abstract. My hope is that people will be able to read that poem, or experience that poem, and come to those conclusions or similar perceptions of their own, ones that would be an active experience of themselves. Hopefully, they might tell me what they experienced and I’d say, “You’re right, ok.” [Laughs.] So, that’s the first step.
KERR: You used the word “crisis” a moment ago, and I took a note to ask about the urgency in your comments. Could you talk about the urgency or necessity to expand towards things, all of the realms?
MCCLURE: I’m interested in poetry that is inspired and in poetry that is of the imagination, and I also respect poetry that is beautiful, or even poems that are ugly. But there is a lot of what I call lawnmower poetry. I can’t read it. I call it lawnmower poetry because it starts one edge of the page with the lawnmower, mows straight across, turns around, mows straight back, turns around, mows straight across—it reads and looks like something done with a lawnmower.
KERR: Well, another question, to touch on two more key words, “methodology” and “anarchism,” and to see if I can get you to draw in Whitehead more, because you did mention The Function of Reason. It seems that you’re describing his sense of a methodology, that it is somehow inspired, or has that anarchy behind it—the living anarchism that you have called a dynamic “systemless system.” This could get us back to the idea of a tool you were just talking about a minute ago.
MCCLURE: In The Function of Reason, Whitehead identifies Reason, saying he believes there is an upward thrust and he says the anti-entropic thrust, the life thrust, chooses among anarchic particles. . . and it chooses among anarchic conditions to feed itself in its upward thrust. Whitehead sees Reason as being the promotion of the art of life. But he does not mean bonhomie. He means life in the universe, in the universe as we know it, which is an open universe—I’ll get back to that in a moment. . . There’s a Zen story, about the turtle. The turtle’s head is the mind, the four legs and the tail are the five senses, and the turtle can pull them all in. And when the turtle pulls them in, then there’s a state that is something like Big Mind, what Suzuki Roshi, the founder of the San Francisco Zen Center, would call Big Mind. Because, when you’re no longer fed the information of the smaller mind and of the senses, when you’re not nurtured by those, you may go back—if you’re not a demon or a hungry ghost—to a place without scale. Then there are fewer realms. You’re living among many realms, and the walls between realms have come down. The patron of Zen wisdom, Manjushri, carries a sword, and one function of the sword is to knock out the shelving between the realms, chop down the doors between the realms, knock out the walls between the realms, kick out the jams. . . . If you do that, if you’re able to do something slightly like that, then no matter how rigid you may be at your core or sunken into an insoluble crisis—because there are insoluble crises—then if you can be a turtle and get everything tucked in—your head, tail, and feet—and then there ought to be a little soft mind around the edges under the shell.

However, soft mind is not an attractive idea because we like to think of ourselves as tough. And we are, we’re tougher than shit and dried tar. What we urgently need is that soft mind around the edges that can create, or allow for, or recognize the wabi, the country gnarliness, and the yugen, or brightness, that it takes to make a haiku by. Also, there is a freedom of the imagination, when it is un-blockaded enough for the appearance and recognition of inspiration and imagination. Did I stay on the track?
KERR: I think you stayed on the track. [Both laugh.] Let me ask this, and get back to “Maybe Mama Lion” because you have a great repetition, you say, “IT’S A GOOD LIFE! / IT’S A GOOD LIFE! / IT’S A GOOD LIFE!”
MCCLURE: “It’s a good life, out of body, out of mind.” But it is intended to be a challenge to the listener.
KERR: Well, I hear possible echoes of The Function of Reason, where Whitehead says that the purpose just isn’t to live. He has three parts here. He says, “to live, to live well, and to live better.”
MCCLURE: Live better, yeah.
KERR: Better. And that’s one of the things about your performances; you are actually stating, or as you say, challenging with the statement, “It’s a good life.”
MCCLURE: Yeah, but I’m stating it in its full environment, in its full range of meanings as well. I do not like cynicism or irony in poetry, but that’s an ugly proposition to press on the audience. It’s a good life? It’s good life? It’s a good life? Don’t tell me it’s a good life! I mean, it may be a consumerist thrill, yeah. And here’s another Whitehead thought, doesn’t Whitehead say that Reason is an attack on the environment? I believe he does. I believe he’s absolutely right. But if we take the environment to mean disposable Redwood trees, and not their qualities of freedom and wildness, if we’re out of control from our daily down-dumbing and propaganda—then we’re an overpopulation experiment on a doomed planet.
KERR: And the last question, the question that ends the poem is. . .
MCCLURE: “Can the salmon drown?”
KERR: And how do you answer that question? Or what ways can you play with answering that question?
MCCLURE: I like Ray’s way. He just slams on the piano, just hits it, bangs on it. That’s a good way. There are questions that do not have answers. People, Americans, have the strange belief that all problems have solutions, all questions have answers. It isn’t so.

By the way, speaking of Whitehead, I found my copy of The Function of Reason that I first read years ago. It was given to me by Harvey Bialy when a group of poets and writers were at Kent State for a poetry conference. On the fly leaf, I wrote in brown ink, “I’M AN EAGLE IN THE WHIRLPOOL. / I’m the fox of reason / I have had my head bent for truth and treason. / I’m a star in the sunny noonlight. / I’m a stumbling fool. / I’m the horse of night / careening on the cliff of flight. / Won’t you kiss me? / Won’t you hug me? / Please / tell me my name. / I’m the hand of April / with my fingers made of fame / Come kiss me on my elbow. / Bless / my / mind / good night. / Sweet old flame. / Sweet old flame. / Bless my mind goodnight. / Come kiss me on my elbow…” etc. The poem is in my book Jaguar Skies. It’s a poem that Ray and I perform together.
KERR: When you describe reading your poems, giving some guidance at the beginning of Plum Stones—and in Touching the Edge, you describe reading the poems as reading calligraphy. You read across the lines and down the lines with the same speed, and again, that’s a very helpful way to look at the poems and to hear them, and to think of performing them. But, it also gets one thinking. What are the different methods that you use to enjoy the imagination, to access it, or however you might want to say that? Calligraphy, performing with Ray, putting plays together, all of these as a play on the word performance, don’t you find performance or performance methods are a great joy of life? And so, why not have more than one, if one is capable of learning from each of them.
MCCLURE: I agree. The people that I enjoy most among my friends are not trapped by their single field of art or nature or science. I talked about writing “Maybe Mama Lion” for Ray, as if it was the first piece I wrote for music, but I’ve written many songs for theater pieces. Theater has a different function than poetry. Poetry is to explore; poetry is to exercise; poetry is to exercise and explore imagination and inspiration. Now that’s a good way to begin in theater too, but theater strives to give an audience the opportunity to be stirred by their imaginations and by the possibilities of what can happen on the stage, which is what you see a few playwrights doing. The ones who utilize the stage as a tensile and athletic thing, and a universe of potentials are: John Webster, Lorca, Shakespeare, Aristophanes, Edward Bond, Goethe, Artaud, Genet. . .
KERR: Or Charles Olson in a way. You’ve talked with Jack Foley about how Olson’s love for Shakespeare really gets into the action of Projective Verse, and about how Projective Verse is translated into your plays.
MCCLURE: Robert Duncan said something insightful about Shakespeare. He said, “All souls are equal in Shakespeare.” I told that to a friend of mine yesterday, when I was on my way to see The Winter’s Tale, and we started talking about Shakespeare. Sterling Bunnell is the most brilliant man I’ve met in my life. He’s a psychiatrist—but that’s beside the point—he’s a naturalist, a visionary thinker. He said, “Shakespeare’s plays are like dreams in the sense that the parts, the oppositional or contrasting parts, all come together, and in their mirroring, they make the solution—make the play.” Although he didn’t use the word solution. I replied, “That’s like Robert Duncan saying that in Shakespeare all souls are equal; the grave-digger is as equal in soul as Titania or Oberon or Macbeth.”

To take another track: writing a novel is different from writing a play, but then, the novels I write are a poet’s novels. Two of my novels have been published. I wrote the first one, The Mad Cub, because I had just finished writing Ghost Tantras, which is a book of ninety-nine poems in Beast Language, and I thought, I’d better make sure that I can still write English. And besides, I’m going to lose the childhood and adolescent memories that are the substance of The Mad Cub. Because most memories decay—except olfactory memories, which tend to last but they shape-change—I didn’t want to forget things that happened in my earlier life. So, I followed some of Jack Kerouac’s ideas of spontaneous prose; I was speed typing while holding the experience-scene in mind, writing what I called “brain movies.” My second novel, The Adept, was written after I wrote Freewheelin Frank’s autobiography. I wrote the autobiography for my Hell’s Angel brother, Freewheelin Frank, who just drove down from the woods to see me the day before yesterday. The book is all his words, and the title is Freewheelin Frank Secretary of the Angels: As Told to Michael McClure. In part, I wrote the second novel, The Adept, because I was worn out by having my plays busted by the police and politicians—especially my play “The Beard.” I don’t mean to sound doleful because I enjoyed it all. The Adept ended up being about a religious experience. When I finished it, I realized I’d written an alchemical text about sensory perceptions and modes: about sight, sound, taste, touch and smell. It’s like a book-length essay on sensory perception in the genre and style of a novel.

You asked me, earlier—before we got started, for my thoughts about current performers. It’s possible that Julia Butterfly Hill is the closest thing we have to a youthful Thoreau. She spent two years tree-sitting in an old-gowth redwood tree in Humbolt County, and this was through the disastrous El Niño winter. She’s written Legacy of Luna, which recounts the lumber corporation’s war on a single young woman in a nest two hundred feet above the forest floor. Just recently she was expelled from Ecuador for her protest regarding major forest damage and oil-matted jungle floors. I introduced her at “Watershed,” the Berkeley environmental event. She not only read some of her tree-top poetry but she gave everyone the opportunity to hear how radical she is politically and how deep her life research has gone. That afternoon as she left, she mentioned that she was going to the Bayshore Amphitheater to perform with the Red Hot Chili Peppers. It pleased me to imagine what the rockers heard from her. Here’s another young performer: I was reading at a demonstration for Mumia Abu Jamal at Civic Center in San Francisco, and I discovered Michael Franti. He danced bare-footed and bare-chested as he swung his dreadlocks and recited his protest poetry. Recently, Franti has put out CDs; regularly, he performs with his rasta-like group. Sometimes he’s heard on Public Radio, but to see him dancing as he performs is terrific. There are short range opinions about the quality of the poetry or spoken word from current artists—it is good to look and listen to the courage these two, and a few of others, are showing.
KERR: Let me ask you this, what poem would you read to these artists? What might be a fitting poem to recognize that courage in their projects?
MCCLURE: We started with “Maybe Mama Lion.” I’d perform it with Ray for them.
KERR: Thanks.
MCCLURE: It’s a good day . . .

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Maybe Mama Lion by Michael McClure [Text] [Audio]